I work for a government agency that has a lot of public meetings. As the press officer, I put out press releases or media advisories about most of the meetings. We take accessibility very seriously, and are careful to make sure the meeting locations are accessible for persons with disabilities. We used to include a requirement that our meeting spaces be "scent-free," but we took an inordinate amount of public ridicule for it that we no longer include that language in our public information about meetings. I mean, I was getting calls from the media about, bloggers who follow our agency were trashing us as overly-PC, considering most of the audience for our meetings are men who smell like Old Spice, stale beer and fish guts.
I get bronchitis if I am in an enclosed space with cigarette smoke for too long. I am careful to avoid those situations. I can understand peanut allergies and being hyper-vigilant with kids. But I often wonder ... I would be hard-pressed to name one kid I ever went to school with back in the 1970s and early 1980s who had a peanut allergy. Is this a fairly new thing (the last 15 years or so?) or did I just grow up in such a small town that we didn't have a peanut allergy sufferer?
Jake
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